Evidence doesn't support choice program expansion

Legislators should be skeptical of a proposal by Gov. Scott Walker to sharply expand the school voucher program. There isn't much evidence that students in voucher schools are better educated; in fact, they seem to perform at about the same level as their peers in mainline public schools.

We also remain deeply skeptical of the move by the Legislature two years ago to open up the program to lower middle-income families. If there is any justification for the voucher schools, it's to give impoverished families a "choice." We have long supported choice for the poor and believe the program should be limited to those families. Republicans essentially are advocating a shadow school system. Why not work harder to adequately fund and hold accountable the system we have?

Walker's plan would expand private voucher programs to at least nine other districts outside Milwaukee and Racine. Families with income of to about $70,000 a year would be eligible.

Before they act, legislators should take a close look at outcomes.

In a report released last month, the state Department of Public Instruction found that students attending voucher schools in Milwaukee and Racine scored lower than public school students in Milwaukee Public Schools and the Racine Unified School District on the state standardized achievement test.

Only about 13% of students in the voucher schools scored proficient or better in math and about 11% scored proficient or advanced in reading. In MPS, about 19% of students were proficient in math and about 14% in reading.

Neither of those results is cause for rejoicing - and certainly not proof of concept for the voucher schools. The voucher experiment is 23 years old; it allows students who qualify to accept a publicly funded voucher worth $6,442 annually to attend a qualifying private school.

Advocates for the choice schools argue only the test scores of low-income MPS students should be compared to voucher students. That would give the voucher students a small advantage in reading. But we think the DPI got it right. It argues that because the income limit was raised, it's appropriate to compare all kids.

It's true that in the state-mandated long-range study of the voucher schools, there are signs of an advantage. The School Choice Demonstration Project has used sampling techniques to track similar groups of students from 2007 to 2011. The findings show that voucher students made reading gains in one of the years studied that were higher than a matched sample of MPS peer students. Math achievement was similar in all the years studied. But the advantage in reading was only for one year and might be related to introduction of a new state testing requirement for the voucher schools.

The long-range study also found that enrolling in a private high school in the choice program "increases the likelihood of a student graduating from high school, enrolling in a four-year college and persisting in college by 4-7 percentage points." But again, a caveat: A majority of students who were enrolled in private choice schools in the ninth grade were no longer in a choice school by the time they reached their senior year.

Walker has indicated he's open to compromise on the voucher issue. He's willing, for example, to target the program only to schools that are failing to meet expectations. And he has said that all voucher schools should participate in the new school report card system, created to judge school performance. That system places schools in one of five grade levels.

But here's the bottom line: The evidence isn't persuasive that the choice schools have had much impact on achievement. Kids in the voucher schools do about the same, overall, as their peers in the public schools.

And that underwhelming finding surely is not enough to justify a broad expansion that seems based more on ideology than on anything else.